


The Return of ANBU Weasel

by skaralding



Series: Uchiha Itachi is Gaara's aniue?! [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Angst with a Happy Ending, Crack Treated Seriously, Gen, No Uchiha Massacre, Pre-Naruto Canon Era, Reincarnated Harry Potter, Reincarnation, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-17 02:24:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16965945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skaralding/pseuds/skaralding
Summary: It’s not until he’s wearing his first ANBU mask (fourth? but definitely the last) that Itachi is finally certain of something very important.He has done this before.





	1. brother

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Shadows from the end of the line](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16267136) by [skaralding](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skaralding/pseuds/skaralding). 



> This story born of an urge to see what murder!Ron would do transplanted into the Narutoverse, followed by an even stronger urge to let poor dead Harry of murder!Ron's timeline have a go. You don't have to read _Shadows from the end of the line_ to understand this; just know that Harry died in a timeline where things went to shit, and was reincarnated as Itachi.

Itachi never had a brother.

Correction: he had a brother, but they weren’t really his, not the way that this one, this gurgling, helpless, baby is. This baby has silky dark hair like his, and Mother has pictures of Itachi that she delights in comparing against his scrunched little face, and…

 _We don’t grow up to look the same,_ Itachi thinks. _We won’t._

* * *

Itachi has known for years now, that there is something wrong with him. More than just the void, the layer of nothingness he feels beneath each kind smile. He (thinks) he has done this before, and done it (all) wrong. He learns everything too easily. His Sharingan has always (always?) been there, been _ready_ , so he has to be careful not to show it until everyone is ready to see it.

He knows things, recognizes people in a strange, systematic way (everyone is delighted or impressed at the way he always remembers their names). And yet, even as he smiles up at Shisui or at Hana, or Iruka, there is something inside him that says (insists) he doesn’t know them at all.

The same thing that is always momentarily confused when he wakes up and blinks and sees the delicate patterns of the wallpaper on his wall.

His eyesight is an Uchiha’s eyesight. It has always been good (it might not remain so). He has never, ever needed glasses.

He remembers how they feel on his face.

* * *

It’s laughable how easy it is to change things. It’s painful, but laughable, too, because he tried so hard, before, wanted so much to escape, to relinquish the several crushing tons of pressure placed on his shoulders. He was dutiful to the last, even as he burned.

But here… when he is not quite so dutiful, not perfect…

It’s _easy_. It makes him incredibly angry.

Fugaku (no longer his honored father) grows resigned. He grows used to the sight of his heir smirking amongst friends, to seeing his flat, unconcerned expression during lectures. He makes a grudging peace with the thought (the understanding) that no one will ever make Itachi do what he does not wish to.

He _still_ ignores Sasuke. So it’s easy for Itachi to hold on to the kernel of contempt, righteous and otherwise, that he’s had since the moment this Fugaku placed a live kunai in his chubby hand.

They wrestle, not very subtly, for the task of educating Sasuke. Mother doesn’t know what to make of it, or how to make them stop, so, after a year of watching and suggesting and other delicate attempts at resolving the issue, she steps in and cuts them both out.

“You’re far too busy,” she says, to Fugaku, “to do this properly. Allow me.”

“Your own progress will slow,” she says, to Itachi, “if you are forever hovering over him.”

Itachi smiles ruefully, and gives in with grace, though this wasn’t what he’d planned to happen. He’d planned to keep pushing the issue, to turn the battle from being about who had the most of Fugaku’s corrosive attention to being about who spent the most time on Sasuke.

An afternoon later, Sasuke stumbles into Itachi’s room (his door, this time around, is _always_ open), and flops onto the bed. “Niisan,” he says, in the high, pathetic whine he’s learned to use here, “can’t _you_ train me?”

“Is Mother not teaching you enough?”

“Niisan,” Sasuke says, “she’ll kill me.”

Itachi laughs, and laughs, and _laughs_. Mother only ever looked in on _his_ torture sessions with Fugaku to dispense gentle hints about missing dinner, and occasionally slip Itachi some dango. This, this realization that she, too, is a sword, it is not new. She took missions, back then, and he saw her return once, bloodied and yet calmly, confidently smiling.

But back then, only Itachi had seen. Sasuke had only ever seen Mother’s soft smile and felt her softer touch.

“Die well, then,” Itachi says, when he can finally get his breath. He laughs again when Sasuke finds enough energy to surge up and try to kick him.

He laughs far too much, here. It worries him.


	2. clan

The first time someone starts muttering about a possible coup– never _that_ word, of course, it’s ‘we should take action’ and ‘change is needed’ rather than anything so obviously traitorous– Itachi puts his newly reinforced knowledge of the compound and the people in it to use. He visits each one of those men and women that desire action.

He is not, in this timeline, someone whose professed desire is to reach the heights of ANBU, so when his victims wake and see him kneeling beside them, they are utterly shocked.

There are three brief, ugly fights. There are far more stony silences. There is not yet fear, not yet anything but realization, re-evaluation. But there is time for that, in this future, so Itachi smiles, as his first move.

Then he leans in, at their bedsides, or at the places they have fallen, felled by his unsparing strikes, and says: “This path you are walking is not one that ends well, oji-san.” Or oba-san. Or aneue, or aniue, or whatever soft, outwardly respectful title fits. “Don’t make me come here again.”

It works, for the space of a month, because for all that Fugaku has expressed frustration with his heir’s somewhat insouciant ways, none of the clan can argue that the man isn’t terribly, helplessly proud of him. None of them think that Itachi’s quiet nightly visits have occurred without Fugaku’s knowledge, Fugaku’s express order.

And then there is the moment that ANBU offers for Itachi– _demands_ him, nearly, in a way that is clearly half insulting and half flattering to the clan– and he firmly refuses. Politely. Self-deprecatingly saying that this one is not sure of his ability to be Konoha’s knife in the shadows.

(Itachi, in this time, has developed a reputation for being just a little soft. It’s surprisingly easy, with all of two timelines’ skill, to be merciful whenever he deals death.)

(It’s even easier to be upset– visibly upset– when he inevitably falls short of such mercy.)

Fugaku, no stranger to the small streak of supposed softness in his son, gives the masked messenger a meaningful look. He is surprisingly graceful about arguing said messenger into putting the offer off for, say, a week or so, so his son can more closely consider this honour. Itachi has to struggle to maintain his pinched, mulish expression, because it’s going _so_ well– he couldn’t ask for a clearer display of the heir and his father being at odds.

Then, at the hastily convened clan council, from which Itachi is pointlessly excluded, he hears one of his victims say, bitterly, that this ruse is unnecessary. That it is perfectly obvious that Fugaku is playing the long game, deliberately presenting the appearance of weakness so their enemies _think_ they have a way in through his heir, all while wielding said heir as his faithful blade.

Fugaku stills. Itachi bites his lip to keep from making a strangled sound; one thing he has learned, this time around, is that Fugaku is really bad at dealing with the sort of roundabout, convoluted manoeuvrings and meanings the Uchiha as a whole are spitefully glad to employ. Fugaku can understand that type of hint, can make them himself, but it has become frightfully clear he doesn’t enjoy doing it.

And Fugaku, for all his other faults, is not a weak man, and is not stupid. He lifts his gaze to the rafters of the frigid shrine basement, his eyes blazing, his gaze on the slight shadow Itachi has been lurking in. “Explain.”

Itachi takes cruel, clear joy in the way the elders and family heads all flinch when he drops to the floor, between them and his fa– between them and Fugaku. “You were going to try to give me the wrong mission, chichiue,” he says. “As you very well know.”

“That is not an explanation,” Fugaku says, his voice arctic, his expression even more so. He _hates_ it when Itachi mouths off to him in public, much less in front of the clan’s council. “Do not make me ask again.”

Itachi bows, to the precise degree that signifies formal apology. He smiles at the ground as he speaks. “This one made some needed visits to our honoured elders, chichiue. This one begs your pardon for their presumption.”

“Visits?” Fugaku says, his cold tone just a little confused.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have dipped into archaic honorifics/titles for effect here. Rough translations below:
> 
> aneue - older sister  
> aniue - older brother  
> chichiue - father


	3. politics

“You call that a _visit_?” Umeno-jisan snarls, half-rising from his perfect seiza. “He broke my arm! I was forced–”

“He nearly gave _me_ a heart attack,” Chieko-obasan mutters. “Disgraceful.”

Naturally, with her outburst, more of the elders feel brave enough to join in. “Fugaku, this _boy_ –” “This travesty can never recur!” “The disrespect, the utter gall of–”

“–and I’m _still_ not on the active roster!” Umeno-ji roars. “Compensation should be–”

Itachi is behind Umeno in under a breath, with a chakra-coated blade just parting the skin on the side of his throat, having substituted with a speck of sand behind him. “Oji-san,” he says, still smiling, “I didn’t make your arm permanently useless, did I? Relax.”

There is a brief, putrid, and horribly satisfying silence. Umeno-ji’s killing intent presses on everything in the room, roiling against that of Fugaku, but though Umeno is straining to act, to _move_ , Itachi has a finger on the seal he left on the back of the older man’s neck, and there is nothing he can do about it.

“I do not love you all so much,” Itachi says, “that I would even hesitate to remove you as I would a thorn in chichiue’s side.”

“Itachi,” Fugaku says, the strain only just audible in his smooth, low tone, “there is no need–”

“They are fools,” Itachi finds himself saying. “They are worse than fools: they are cowards. They are only making things more difficult.” His blade shifts, just a little, though he knows it shouldn’t. “They would send me– _me_ – rather than go, themselves, beneath the village’s suspicious eyes.”

That was in the plan, to be said smoothly, contemptuously. Not like this, in a low, empty, furious tone he only ever used in the After of Before.

“Control yourself,” Fugaku snaps, but Itachi knows him well enough this time that he hears– and reads, feels– the concern within it. “Stand down.”

Umeno-jisan used to be… not _frightening_ , precisely, but something like it. He’s so much taller and broader than Itachi is now, or will ever be (or has ever been). It was not fear for himself, Itachi realizes, suddenly, that he used to feel, thinking of this man. It was fear that facing him, fighting him, Itachi would be forced to become the animal he knew he had within him, to win.

Not so true, now. Here, Itachi can put away his blade and release the paralysis seal, and shunshin back to kneel before Fugaku without even worrying that Umeno might retaliate. Because Itachi knows that he can handle anything Umeno might do. Knows it.

“The mission I will give you,” Fugaku says, as if Itachi’s outburst had not just happened, “will not be easy.”

Itachi listens to his father figure’s careful, precise explanation of what they need from him if he will take up an honourable position in the village. It should amuse him that Fugaku is very careful not to say the word ‘ANBU’; that he frowns down a half-spoken interjection from someone that snorts at the thought of Itachi being able to serve the clan’s secret purpose even as tokubetsu jonin.

It all makes him burn with rage, with something that feels empty and old and not quite of his last life. He doesn’t understand why he rages beneath a placid, falsely accepting smile, when the plan is going perfectly.

It is only that night, as he tucks Sasuke into bed, and feels himself frowning at the half-healed nicks and cuts on his brother’s small, pale hands, that Itachi understands why he’s still angry. _Sasuke,_ he can almost hear himself thinking, _is a child, and yet, if he showed promise like me…_

If it had been Itachi as the younger, weaker, whinier brother, with Sasuke as the unthinking genius? They would have sent him too, to do the job of a man.

_Child soldiers,_ he thinks, _are an abomination._

And then thinks back to Before, suddenly acutely aware of why and when he first had that thought. Suddenly understanding that, even the first time, even crushed, tired and despairing, he’d never– ever– _ever_ thought of _himself_ as that abomination.

Or, more correctly, as that which could be turned into said abomination.


	4. unmasked

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posting this a little earlier than planned because gdi, it needs to be up so I can post a certain side story. 
> 
> Note that I'm handwaving some Sharingan lore here; in this universe when Uchiha switch eyes with each other they all get access to the techniques in all four eyes because why the fuck not. This is an Uchiha-only phenomenon because Uchiha are all _special_.

It’s not until he’s wearing his first ANBU mask (fourth? but definitely the last) that Itachi is finally certain of something very important.

He has done this before.

He did this– this knowing, this moving through a new-old life– _Before_.

He has not been a child in a long, long time. Before, he could never understand why it was so common for even seasoned ninja to look at him and immediately discount his skills and his experience, even after reading his file. He understood the logic behind that sort of reaction, obviously, but he had always chafed at the thought of said logic being applied to him.

It had been far too obvious to him that he wasn’t a child. He’d had a child’s brain and (too many of) a child’s weaknesses, yes, but a fully formed net of adult thoughts and adult understanding and half-forgotten experience had ruled over it all.

He’d used to think it was _normal_ – for a genius, if nothing else. He spent a lot of time feeling confused, feeling set apart, and until here, until this strange second (third) chance, he had never pinned down why he felt so very different.

He had not had a brother before… Before. Not a brother like Sasuke, so young and helpless. He had nearly perished at Sasuke’s hand to atone for failing him, but it had not felt like enough, and so the Old Before had swelled in him, and he had sought out seals and wielded them, all to claw his way into this precious second chance.

Only, this time around, he began with the acute awareness that his situation was, and would continue to be… unnatural. Beginning from that perspective has made so many things (terribly) clear. Has made him certain that he is missing important parts of what came before Before.

Worrying about that missing knowledge absorbs a frightening amount of his free hours, but Itachi has learned his lesson. He will never again let that sort of worry keep him from acting.

* * *

Danzo perishes in perfect flames, two months after Itachi’s annexation by ANBU. He doesn’t catch fire until well after Itachi has painstakingly cut out his tongue.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Itachi says, smiling a little, unable to help it. “I’m not doing this for the clan, you know. You’re a threat to Konoha.”

Which he is, truly. Danzo’s record Before was appalling; he destroyed and twisted so much. All in addition to being the man who _stole_ , who pressed and squeezed the Uchiha until they were down to three unsuitable men, three vengeful shadows, two of them posing great danger to Konoha.

This _is_ for the village, but… Danzo had also put his hand on Itachi’s heart, and wielded him as a tool. Watching him choke on his own foul blood is unbearably sweet.

Danzo gurgles, and glares, and lets out a defiant, whistling cry, his broken fingers struggling to form a hand seal. So Itachi lets loose and makes him ash, and takes the time to sweep him up and settle him into a good-quality urn. He smiles as he poses the urn beside a sheaf of the most incriminating documents he could find on short notice.

And then it is time for the walk back, which is strange. Lingering in the darkened tunnels of ROOT– tunnels that once felt like they could crush him, tunnels he tried never to spend an extra moment of his time within– it feels strange. But it is necessary; he doesn’t like using his latest knockout seal without making sure to tailor it to the target’s body weight, and he didn’t have the time to do so in this situation.

It takes an extra half hour, but it eases him to know that only one ROOT agent was having any trouble breathing. It means he feels almost happy, when he finally turns himself in.

* * *

Explaining his precipitate action to everyone is a necessary, but tedious task. T&I grind and push and twist and dig at Itachi, and are concerned that he nearly never stops smiling. Morino-san breaks bones and orders them healed only to tear away skin, and yet always leaves unsatisfied. Yamanaka Inoichi spends gruelling hours picking through the cramped, brightly lit shelving in Itachi’s mind, growing ever more annoyed at just how annoyingly specific, redundant and useless all his memories seem to be.

They do not break him.

They believe him, grudgingly, when he says he did it for the children, both those in his clan and those that remained in ROOT. Even Fugaku believes him, though by now, _something_ should really not be ringing true.

It’s true that the fact that there is only one child that Itachi would happily do murder for has been somewhat obscured by his carefully cultivated friendships with his peers. It’s also true that Itachi would never have even thought of leaving any children in ROOT’s bonds. However, no one seems to have considered how on earth he could possibly have intuited that children his age and younger were regularly recruited by ROOT, when Danzo went to great lengths to keep that from becoming general knowledge.

Then again, the first (or second?) time around, everyone around Itachi was always eager to believe either the best or the worst of him. It’s fitting that his interrogators all seem happy to rely on his tragic or evil genius as the default explanation to even the biggest holes in their theories of why he ‘snapped’.

Some time later, Fugaku comes to visit. He looks through the visitors’ window at Itachi and his expression is like slowly cracking stone, with horror beneath. Bearable, though, because it could have been worse.

(He could have looked up at Itachi instead of across at him. He could have looked sad. Bloodied, but resigned.)

“Chichiue,” Itachi says, inclining his head forward, “have I not completed my mission to your satisfaction?”

Fugaku struggles for a moment, but eventually he mouths a soft, defeated, “Yes.”

“Then, chichiue,” Itachi says, squirming in his padded seat, fiddling with the chakra cuffs on his wrists, “can I go to Suna for the summer?”

“Yes,” Fugaku says, his tone still soft. “You’ve earned a vacation.”

* * *

Of course they don’t expect him to, well. To just go ahead and _take_ the vacation.

Itachi laughs as he speeds away, unmasked, ANBU thick on his heels, civilians freezing or cowering whenever he comes too near. Shisui is the one to finally (almost) catch up to him, his dark hair flaring wildly behind the lines of his new, more colourful mask, his hair loose because he put on the mask and shroud in an obvious hurry.

“Surrender,” Shisui begs, though to anyone else, it would sound like a harsh, monotone order. “Surrender or die.”

“May we trade, cousin?” Itachi says, over his shoulder, short of breath because he’s fast, but Shisui has always been faster. Shisui really does not want to catch him. “An eye for an eye?”

Shisui is not expecting Itachi to slow, to shift and draw a blade, to be in just the right place to both seal and stab him.

Shisui fractures his own bones, resisting, but in the end, their eyes are all eternal. The new eyes feel strange in Itachi’s head, and the itch of his pathways twisting to accommodate a new technique feels even stranger, but he’s sure he’ll adapt.

“Swear to me,” Itachi finally says, “that you will never harm Konoha’s children. Swear that, with these eyes, you will only protect.”

“I swear,” Shisui lies, terrified and smiling. “I swear, cousin.”

(Sadly for him, just verbal agreement is enough to activate the seals burned onto his temples. Hopefully, he doesn’t kill himself, testing the eyes on someone inappropriate.)

“Well, then,” Itachi says, smiling fondly down at him. “Take care of Sasuke, will you? Tell him I’ll send him something nice from Suna.”

(He does pat his shivering, glaring cousin on the shoulder one last time. Shisui was a fool, Before, but it wasn’t his fault. He really had been a child, an abomination lashing every which way, desperate for relief.)

Then there’s the run, not to Suna, but to a neat little valley just north of Wave Country, one that Itachi scoped out months ago. High sides, lonely, inconveniently far from both the road and the nearby towns, and a dried-out stream; nothing left to draw anyone’s attention. Bandit hideout, now and then, for unsuccessful (and, as it was in this time, deeply unlucky) bandits.

There’s someone Itachi’s been dying to meet.

* * *


	5. traitor

“You,” Obito says, from behind his mask, “have caused me a lot of trouble.”

There’s a reason Itachi moved so quickly with Danzo; Obito was off in Kiri at the time, Kiri and possibly also Ame, meddling as he always did. Obito had left things in Konoha in what he likely believed to be the perfect condition– tensions rising, the Uchiha clan stewing, Itachi publicly fracturing underneath the pressure to succeed in conflicting ways even without having encountered a mysterious ancestor in the Naka shrine, and so on and so forth.

Obito is clearly not expecting Itachi to jump to his feet and smile.

Obito is surprised that, when he tries to teleport through Kamui to Itachi’s side, to begin the beating that comes before the inevitable kill, he stumbles instead, his eye bleeding, his body wrenched in strange directions.

“It’s good of you to come to me to be judged,” Itachi says, milking the moment for all it is worth. He’s sure this won’t mean death for himself. Almost sure. It is a terrifyingly good feeling. “It seems you do know you’re unworthy of that eye, ninja-san.”

Obito charges, and Itachi meets him. No time for thought, no time, no genjutsus, just brutal, feral swipes and thrusts and slashes.

“Uchiha filth,” Obito snarls, a moment later, bleeding from two gashes when Itachi has only one. “You’ll regret the day you crossed me. You, your entire clan–”

“Children included?” Itachi spits. “Why do I even ask– for people like you, for the greater good–” A heavy thrust, a shift of position Obito could not prevent, and _there_ was the first deep cut. The beginning. “What am I even saying. Greater good? No. Men like you, men like _us_ ,” and there, his enemy flinches, “we’re selfish, aren’t we?”

Obito’s eye narrows, and though Itachi knows he shouldn’t, he finds himself letting out a short bark of laughter in between hurried shunshins. “Ninja-san–”

“Shut up.”

“–you know you’re cursed, too, right?”

Obito’s breaths are loud. Angry.

“Even if you killed us all,” Itachi says, savouring each word, “you would still share our curse, Uchiha-san.”

“ _Shut up,_ ” Obito snarls, and now they’re exchanging ninjutsu. Well, not so much exchanging, as breathing great gouts of fire at each other. Fire that Itachi is careful to only match and cancel out, because this is still the man who masqueraded as Madara. This is still a man he feared, and he must conserve his chakra to better his chances. “Is that all you’re capable of, Itachi-kun, in front of your honoured ancestor?”

Itachi laughs, and very nearly loses half his leg to a vicious wind blade. Several moments later, having clawed back some control of the fight, he manages to say: “If you’re an ancestor, I’m a fucking goat.”

“Say that again when I’m digging out your guts.”

It’s another long moment before Itachi can get the breath to say: “Traitor.”

The battle becomes frenzied, then, one hit following the other until the valley around them is burning, sagging, slumping. The seals burn on the valley’s walls, the strange, sharp letters within them wavering in the heat. “They struck your name from the memorial stone,” Itachi lies, because _he’s_ the one that did that, inking in a hasty, time-delayed seal before his last private visit with Danzo. “They all already know.”

Obito turns, then, and his brutal taijutsu reorients towards escape, towards the edges of the valley. He aims for the nearest spot between two burning, man-height seals, and Itachi realizes, with a start, that this doesn’t have to end in the other man’s escape.

That, instead, if he just tweaks a character here, a rune there–

Obito hammers a kick into his chest during his distraction, and darts for the barrier. Itachi coughs blood onto a shaking hand, and _reaches_.

Blood sprays. Obito’s body slumps apart, a step past the barrier, his blood steaming on the ground in the frigid spring air.

“–zanagi,” Obito wheezes, his body already whole again, so Itachi surges up and over to his prone, weakened form, and a whispered Amatarasu is the end.

Hours later, the great burning black circles of the barrier seals finally go dim. Itachi, still reeling from the chakra exhaustion brought about by his unexpected success, is only half surprised when the ground beside him boils, and spits out Zetsu.

He watches blankly when his final trap– a heavy-duty containment seal– gulps up the black and white halves of the ninja before he can do more than slash open Itachi’s side.

Shell-shocked, Itachi just sits there, staring at Obito’s ashes, at the new, densely inked scroll sitting on the ground to his left, until he feels himself getting lightheaded.

Then, instead of calling forth some weak, but serviceable medical chakra, he finds himself muttering, with a hand over the seeping wound, something that sounds like “apisuki”.

It’s not really a shock that it works– he remembers, suddenly, the way he used to handle his lungs Before, when he was desperate. It’s something, though.

Whatever it is, it leaves him feeling tired.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lord save me from the Naruto timeline. Funnily enough, when I was doing research for this, it turned out that there was actually a convenient point I could magic in Itachi stewing after a ~mysterious meeting with Obito at the Naka shrine two years before the massacre, and since no one cared enough to really detail wtf was happening in Kiri at the time, it's perfectly reasonable that Obito could have been popping back there to do fuck knows what. I love this fandom. So many convenient plot holes! Everything is possible!!1
> 
> I will say I couldn't help but feel a little sorry for Obito even as I let Itachi grind him under heel, lol. Unfortunately for him, Itachi didn't personally witness his heel face turn in his last life. Haven't decided yet if it's because he was off merrily researching sealing in some dank cave somewhere, or if he did his trip back before the big ol' tsukiyomi. Though even if this version of Itachi _was_ aware that Obito repented, it's tough to say whether he would still have bothered trying to spare him. This Itachi's kind of... unforgiving, in general. Now for the last chapter...


	6. holiday

Itachi doesn’t mean to go to Suna for anything more than strict necessity. Rasa is not someone he cares for, but he knows how desperate Suna got, how everything from the machinations of their daimyo to their suboptimal location has conspired against them. They were a stalwart support for Konoha in the lead-up to the Fourth War, and he wants to honour that, and give both them and their greatest weapon some room to breathe.

The fact that helping them will give Itachi a lever to manipulate to Konoha’s benefit is also a plus.

But then he sees Gaara’s face– his wide, shocked green eyes, his soft red hair– and suddenly, it’s not enough to kidnap him to fix his seal and give him a careful talking-to, layered with a very slight Yin compulsion against giving into bloodlust unnecessarily.

Gaara is a child, too. He’d forgotten that.

And Gaara looks… it’s not precisely familiar. It’s _not_. But…

So Itachi becomes ‘Aniue’, Gaara’s (sort of) imaginary friend. Just for a few weeks. There are no hugs, because that would be crossing a line in Itachi’s mind; hugs are only for brothers. But when the moon is fat and full, and Shukaku presses on Gaara until he might break, Itachi holds his hand while they walk through the sandstorm.

“You’ll come back,” Gaara says, when Itachi really cannot linger any longer. It’s not an order, really, even in that iron tone. It’s more of a desperate demand. “When will you come back?”

“End of the year, if possible,” Itachi says, squirming inside. He is too old (far too old) to be giving concessions like this to anyone but Sasuke. But he does it anyway, smiling a little and squeezing Gaara’s hand as he says, “I promise I’ll try to be here as soon as possible.”

“…Fine.”

Gaara doesn’t believe him. Gaara clearly doesn’t _want_ to want to believe him. It makes Itachi stroke a hand through his soft red hair, all while fighting a smile.

* * *

Itachi has been adrift like this before, untethered from all his known world, empty of anything but duty. It’s easier this time, when his hands are red with mostly the blood of the deserving. He has not knowingly harmed a single innocent when he could not otherwise help it. He feels light, knowing that.

He sleeps long and well, in between the necessary hunts that make up the rest of his self-imposed, long-running mission for peace. He makes a point of visiting all his old, favoured haunts, and of never leaving a newish-to-him town without trying some of the local speciality.

Konoha is no longer Itachi’s home, by pragmatic, still-bitter choice, but it’s nice to visit now and then. If only so that he can keep an eye on the Uchiha, after looking in on his unhappy, but mostly mentally sound otouto.

The clan needs only one more bloody reminder that they are nothing without the village. Afterwards, the occasional conspicuous gift left at either Umeno-ji or Yashiro-ji’s gravestone seems to do a decent job of keeping the rest of them on track.

* * *

The years pass in an uneven rhythm. Itachi sneaks home to deliver meticulously wrapped souvenirs, along with teasing, cryptic notes. Sasuke makes genin, a half year into Itachi’s mean-spirited cold war with Orochimaru, and so Itachi pops into Wave Country at what he thinks would be the right time, wondering if sheer coincidence will end up spitting out Team 7 onto the mainland stretch of the route that leads to the island.

(He killed Gato mostly, but not solely, for his money.)

Coincidence spits no one onto the Wave road, so Itachi shrugs and turns his attention to his next attempt at trying to con his way into Orochimaru’s lair by pretending to be a bastard Uchiha.

* * *

It isn’t until the chunin exams that Itachi realizes how much has changed. Naruto is in the stands, chatting amicably with a girl Itachi doesn’t recognize, and they are both (already?) wearing chunin vests. Sasuke is on a genin team with a smirking Hyuuga and an Aburame in pigtails, and he is scowling and wearing all black, with the smallest possible uchiwa embroidered on his shoulder.

Itachi is not completely sure that everything is all right, or that the changes he’s set in motion have borne fruit. Then, during the semifinal in the third stage, Gaara pins Sasuke to the side of the arena, and Sasuke yields after only a moment.

It’s done with bad grace, with a scowl, but he doesn’t fight against Gaara’s sand when it gently lowers him to the arena floor. “Good match,” Sasuke even mutters, almost too quietly to hear. Then adds, because of course he does: “You’d better win it all, bastard.”

“My win will be for Aniue’s sake,” Gaara says, coldly. “Not yours.”

(Itachi cannot be seen in Konoha, and since he will not break this rule for anyone, Gaara was forced to accept that there will be no summer visit this year. Clearly, he’s still stewing about it.)

(Screening his presence from Gaara’s sand is getting more challenging for Itachi every year.)

Sasuke growls and stomps, limping a little, out of the arena. Itachi is expecting either Kakashi or Shisui to be the one to reach out and squeeze his shoulder, but instead, it’s a tall, spindly older Nara he doesn’t recognize. “You lost your temper,” that man says, “but you recovered well.”

“He was faster than we thought,” Sasuke mutters, slumping a little. “I– I should’ve–”

“You did your best,” is the mild, yet stern answer. Itachi expects his brother to bristle, to argue more, like Before. To be desperately angry, and unsatisfied with even a sensible loss. Instead, Sasuke relaxes, and the Nara pats him on the back, and suddenly he’s watching the next match properly, instead of avoiding it with his gaze.

Itachi feels warm all over, and cold inside. _He’s alright,_ he thinks. _He no longer needs me._

Still, he can’t bring himself not to linger in Sasuke’s room that night, just listening to him breathe. He leaves a congratulatory note on the desk, beside a neat little package of green tomato bread, the kind they sell in Kusa. He doesn’t think Sasuke eats anything he leaves for him, so he makes sure he leaves directions to the best stall for it in his note as well.

As he prepares to climb out of Sasuke’s window, Itachi is both annoyed by the necessity for stealth, and satisfied by the fact that Sasuke’s traps have gotten far less obvious. He smiles as he slides the window shut behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So we reach the end of this bit of Itachi's story. The sequel is a longer, fluffier, and way more shippy story that may or may not be to your taste, but follows Itachi's further adventures after he's more or less fixed what he came back to fix.
> 
>  _Edit from the future:_ in case you're wondering, the person Gaara reminds Harry!Itachi of is Ron. Specifically, Ron from the crapsack future in _Shadows from the end of the line_ , which is the universe this sad sack Harry is from ;)

**Author's Note:**

> This is intended to be the first, short-ish story in a slightly longer series. The story is complete, just needs some editing/tlc before each chapter goes up. I'm new to the Naruto fandom, so have relied heavily on the wiki; whenever I'm diverging deliberately from canon, I'll try to let you know.


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